Mozilla has acquired Anonym, a trailblazer in privacy-preserving digital advertising. This strategic acquisition enables Mozilla to help raise the bar for the advertising industry by ensuring user privacy while delivering effective advertising solutions.
About Anonym: Anonym was founded in 2022 by former Meta executives Brad Smallwood and Graham Mudd. The company was backed by Griffin Gaming Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Heracles Capital as well as a number of strategic individual investors.
Wasn’t Mozilla supposed to be looking for a new CEO? Maybe they should get that done before throwing away millions of dollars on acquisitions? Surely the rush to destroy everything by adopting slogans like “data is the fuel that drives performance advertising” can wait for a few more months?
As it says there, Laura Chambers was to take the job “for the remainder of this year” in a “transitional period” before a more permanent choice was made.
But I suppose this removes any doubt we might’ve had about whether she is keen to continue Mitchell Baker’s bright idea of turning Firefox into an ad platform. I had harboured some hope that opponents of that idea were the ones who forced the previous CEO out.
That article makes is very clear that Laura Chambers is filling an interim role as CEO for less than a year as they look for someone else to take the role on a longer term basis.
It’s not clear to me if this is an acquisition of the venture capital subsidiary, but this part of Anonym’s FAQ is disappointing:
Privacy is an ambiguous term! Our primary focus is reducing or eliminating the need for advertisers and ad platforms to share personally identifiable information, attributes and behaviors about individuals with each other. It’s this kind of data sharing that often violates the expectations of users and creates legal and policy compliance issues.
Before I start reading, if this has anything to do with differential privacy, I’m going to be disappointed.
